A few years ago, a viral social media trend emerged that highlighted the way male writers often portray female characters. Women were invited to describe themselves as if they were being written by a male author, and many responded with similarly clichéd and superficial descriptions, such as “she had a personality and beautiful eyes” or wore “soft lipstick and gentle mascara.”
Female characters written by male authors are frequently depicted through idealised fantasies rather than through the complex and often painful realities many women experience.
Beyond the colour of her lipstick or the shape of her eyes, a woman’s identity is shaped by many complicated experiences, including navigating sexual violence, trauma, and societal expectations surrounding relationships and singlehood.
By contrast, when female characters are written by women, their portrayals often explore the nuanced and multifaceted experiences that continually shape a woman’s sense of self.
Women have always existed beneath the weight of scrutiny, not only from men, but from other women, too. From the way they tend to their appearance to how they balance motherhood alongside ambition, the experience of being a woman is never just one woman’s story; it travels from mother to daughter and from one generation to the next.
Below is a collection of books by Egyptian women authors, each one a window into a lived experience, and more importantly, into what can be learned, carried, and gained from it.
Always Coca-Cola by Alexandra Chreiteh
Abeer Ward comes from a conservative Lebanese family, and there is nothing that occupies her mind more than preserving her reputation, virginity, and “purity.” Although her home functions as a conservative and restrictive space, outside it, she is confronted with airbrushed images of women on Coca-Cola billboards, reflecting the tension between the modern, globalized world and the traditional expectations imposed by her family life.
Beirut itself becomes a character in this novella, as its Coca-Cola billboards serve as a metaphor for the ways Lebanese women navigate their relationships with their own bodies, and the outside forces that shape them.
Abeer’s two friends, Jana and Yasmine, construct their own ideas of womanhood, shaped by their individual experiences and identities. Jana, a Romanian-Lebanese model, expresses her sexuality openly and confidently, while Yasmine, a boxer, resists traditional expectations of femininity altogether. Although neither conforms to society’s ideal of the “proper” woman, both are still criticized and constrained for stepping beyond those accepted boundaries.
Ultimately, the three women are forced to confront a world that monitors and controls their bodies. From Jana’s unplanned pregnancy to Abeer’s survival of sexual violence, they face overlapping forces of oppression, which are the male gaze, colonialism, and the beauty myth.
One of the novel’s most striking features is how openly it discusses the female body. Chreiteh writes about menstruation, virginity, desire, pregnancy, waxing, shame, and bodily anxiety in direct, everyday language.
The title itself is symbolic. “Always Coca-Cola” refers both to global consumer culture and to the confusing overlap between branding, femininity, desire, and identity in Beirut’s urban environment. Coca-Cola advertisements, beauty culture, and Westernized images of femininity coexist with conservative social expectations, creating contradictions that the women must constantly navigate.
Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal
The story of a young woman who died by suicide in 1963 at twenty-seven years old, before her work finally reached the public, is far from a light or simple subject. To engage with her life and legacy requires a rejection of superficiality; instead, the sheer weight of her story demands a confrontation with the harrowing realities often forced upon women.
When Iman Mersal, Egyptian author, discovers Enayat al-Zayyat’s only novel in a Cairo bookstall in the 1990s, she embarks on a journey of investigative nonfiction centered on the life of a writer who died by suicide in 1963 in Cairo before her only novel was published. Rather than turning her story into a simple chronology of events, the book excavates her life like an archaeologist, probing the emotional and social conditions confronting women writers in mid-20th-century Egypt through interviews with surviving relatives and friends, old newspaper archives, abandoned addresses, legal records, photographs, and literary traces.
While details of Enayat al-Zayyat’s life remain difficult to verify because much of what is known comes from biographical research, research into her life reveals a woman who struggled with depression from a young age and who spent periods of her life receiving psychiatric treatment. Like many women of her time, Enayat married young and soon found herself trapped in an unhappy and reportedly abusive marriage. However, following her separation, she became embroiled in difficult divorce and custody disputes while struggling to raise her young son.
Her despair came from an accumulation of experiences: an abusive marriage, social expectations surrounding womanhood, the pressures of motherhood, and the stigma surrounding mental illness.
It feels relevant today because Enayat al-Zayyat’s story echoes recent discussions in Egypt around divorce, motherhood, child custody, and women’s mental health. Recent public conversations following cases of an Egyptian mother dying by suicide after painful custody battles and social isolation have made Mersal’s work feel current. Although Enayat’s story took place in the early 1960s, the pressures surrounding divorced mothers and the stigma attached to women who leave marriage remain recognizable.
Professor Hanaa by Reem Bassiouney
Some novels begin with a scene, while others unfold gradually through the inner lives of their characters. Yet in Professor Hanaa by Egyptian writer Reem Bassiouney, the story opens at a moment of crisis; though it may not appear to be a crisis in the conventional sense, for many women, it becomes the very foundation of their identity.
Hanaa realizes that despite her intellectual achievements and professional authority, she is still socially perceived as incomplete because she is unmarried and sexually inexperienced. Terrified of becoming permanently trapped in loneliness and emotional sterility, she decides she wants to lose her virginity before turning forty.
Hanaa’s tragedy is not simply that she is unmarried; it is that her society has taught her to experience her body primarily through shame, surveillance, and lack. Her virginity becomes both a symbol of moral respectability and a prison. The novel exposes the contradiction imposed on many women, and how they are expected to remain sexually “pure,” yet are simultaneously judged and devalued if they remain unmarried too long.
She is intellectually brilliant yet emotionally fragile, desiring intimacy yet terrified of surrendering control. Her sexuality is entangled with power, fear, aging, loneliness, and social pressure, turning the novel into a topic that is less about sexual freedom and more about the psychological violence produced when female desire is denied legitimate expression.
Distant View of a Minaret by Alifa Rifaat
Women’s voices are often conveyed through the dialogue of female characters, but in Egyptian author Alifa Rifaat’s writing, those voices emerge directly from women’s inner thoughts. Her female characters speak openly and fearlessly, expressing every feeling and opinion a woman might have, even during moments of intimacy with her husband.
The story begins with a woman lying beside her sleeping husband, reflecting on how little he cares about her desires. Although her marriage appears respectable from the outside, she feels unfulfilled, especially sexually. Her husband treats intimacy in a mechanical and self-centered way, focusing solely on his own pleasure while her needs and emotions remain neglected and unspoken.
The bedroom becomes a symbol of inequality: even within marriage, where intimacy should involve mutual connection and pleasure, the woman is denied fulfillment and agency over her own body. She exposes the invisible suffering of ordinary women whose pain is often dismissed because it occurs inside the home, hidden behind the appearance of a “normal” marriage.
Instead of leaving women’s lives concealed behind closed doors, or buried within their thoughts and emotions, these books bring their experiences into the open, allowing the wider world to finally see, truly see, a woman through a woman’s own eyes.
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